Portrait Project

Danielle Slutzky

MBA 2013

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

She
kept a mini fridge in her bedroom stocked with my favorite chocolate, Pesek Zman, the Israeli version of the Kit Kat bar.

My
grandmother led me to her fridge when I visited each June. By age seven, I’d imagine the red and yellow
wrapped candies shouting, "Bruchim Habaim
le-Israel! [Welcome to Israel!]" I’d swing the fridge open, and the bars
would spill onto the floor.She'd pick them
up, place one in my hand and stick three in my back pocket, "just in case."

She
never shared her Holocaust story, but I understood a piece of it from the way
she shared her food. Extra cinnamon.Sticky honey.Powdered sugar.In the concentration camps where she grew up,
strangers determined how much food was enough and who deserved it.Food was a dream: unreliable, fleeting, but a
source of hope.She survived to fulfill her
one desire that the lives of her children and grandchildren be filled only with
overflowing sweetness.

My life
is sweet, which makes my job urgent: to
unleash the hope that food provides. I want to make the food industry part of the solution to malnourishment and
obesity.I want to redesign our supermarket
aisles so that we can think less about what food to buy and more about with
whom to share it. I want to be proud of my efforts to make healthy products
mainstream.

I will
nourish my family, friends, and strangers.I will listen to the stories their food tells.And when they visit my office and my home, my
story will spill from the cupboards. I will scoop it up and place in your hand
my promise to improve our food.

— Danielle Slutzky

The Portrait Project

Each year we ask our classmates a straightforward, simple question taken from the lines of a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mary Oliver.
We share with you intimate and candid responses to this question, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"